The Myth of the Rational Voter: People Vote Like Idiots, and Why

I’ve recently finished reading The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies which builds a framework for understanding why the electorate commonly vote for such idiotic proposals, especially related to economics. The author, Bryan Caplan, delivers a wonderfully well researched book that is engagingly written, a tough tasks for what is actually an economics book. He tears apart rational voting theory, the idea that the idiots balance out and smart people make the last few % points of decision, and explains an economic take on why voters make poor decisions.

Bryan Caplan explains that in voting most actors are rationally ignorant and rationally irrational. Without going through all the analysis most people are rationally ignorant because they make a rational decision to forgo the effort required to fix their ignorance since voting has such a small expected payoff. People are rationally irrational for much the same reason, taking an easy or socially accepted position rather than figuring out the correct solution out of a rational lazyness. Basically, since we understand that our vote counts so little we make little effort to make vote in an intelligent way.

I highly recommend picking this one up, it will give you a whole new set of tools in understanding politics and participating in debate and it is an incredibly interesting read.